


I'll Carry You Home

by coincidental



Category: Bandom, Empires, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Angst, M/M, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coincidental/pseuds/coincidental
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sean never understood why Tom signed up, not even right up to the moment he hugged him tight and<br/>kissed him goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Carry You Home

When he went, Sean was left at a loss. They argued so very much in those last few weeks and when the bitterness and the anger and the pleading trailed off... the silence became palpable almost, terse and fraught between them, hurting and distant. 

Sean lay in bed with Tom clutched to him and he already felt like there was something insubstantial in the motion, like Tom wasn't there any more. He was scrabbling at fraying ends of a rope he couldn't really grasp anymore that slipped steadily out of his hands. Sean never understood why Tom signed up, not even right up to the moment he hugged him tight and kissed him goodbye. 

They both poured their hearts into that lingering goodbye, Sean pressed it to Tom's mouth with his lips and he dug it into his skin with his nails and he whispered it into his hair and he said the things he'd promised not to.

"I love you Tommy, please don't go, please don't leave me." Tom had looked so accusing when he did that, so angry and so sad, the emotion scored into the lines of his face and his serious eyes. Saying goodbye had been hell, but Sean didn't know that it wasn't goodbye that would hurt the most.

What really hurt  was going home, gong back to their apartment and crawling into their double bed alone when the sheets still smelled of Tom and his used coffee mug was still on the bedside table. That hurt. The entire place still had this imprint of Tom in every crevasse and corner, his fingerprints all over everything. Sean fell asleep that first night wondering how long it'd be until they left him too.

 

-

 

It was only a year. Sean told himself that so very many times in those first few hours, days, weeks, but they dragged by so achingly slowly and it began to weigh heavier and heavier on his heart and his tense shoulders that a year was kind of a long time. At least, it was an awfully long time to part ways with someone you loved, someone you needed like breathing. 

It wasn't like Tom talked much, but somehow, the volume was down, Sean's life was just so much quieter without him. 

 

-

 

To say it got easier to live without Tom by his side would be bullshit, utter bullshit, but Sean explained it that way to people, because it was easiest to make sense of in those terms. In reality it got no easier, he just got used to the ache of sleeping alone and coming home to an empty apartment.

They wrote each other, a lot. Sean's letters were long and rambling and desperately trying to pretend life went on as normal, love and longing poured into untidy quickly spilled cursive words on white paper. He told Tom about the weather, the crazy lady downstairs, he told him about music, work, about his friends. Tom wrote him back in the slow looping simple hand that Sean found endearingly childish, clear conscious effort put into the phrasing of all he wrote. Tom spoke usually of how tired he was, the friends in his barrack, the midday heat. How much he missed home. Sean wishes there was some way to send Tom a little of their life in an envelope, a torn off fraction of the bigger picture, just enough to make Tom's homesickness less. Sean knew how it felt to long for the Chicago skyline, though he'd never been so far from her before as Tom was now.

 

-

 

It was months before Sean started to feel Jon's presence in his life as more than a flicker, but there he would be, on Sean's doorstep with excuses of borrowing photography equipment, or needing to check something in a book Tom had. Sean didn't tend to ask after a while. Jon had always been Tom's best friend, so like him somehow,  but the calmer member of the two, easygoing smile and so laid back sometimes, Sean would swear the guy was lying down.

It was easy to let Jon be his friend too, to let him fill a little  of the hollow Tom left aching so keenly in Sean's life. Sean didn't know why, but he felt hesitant to tell Tom that he and Jon were friends, but he did. Tom's response was overwhelmingly positive and Sean thought that perhaps he should have made an effort to befriend Jon before, though better late than never.

 

-

 

The first time Tom called home, Jon was round. 

They were watching arty movies and arguing whether or not they really had a point, throwing popcorn at each other and gesticulating with beer in hand. Sat at either end of the couch, despite the comfortable nature their friendship had developed, the gap between them remained there for Tom; the invisible link and buffer between the two of them, there and yet so far removed somehow, that Sean could spend long lonely moments wondering if he'd somehow made him up.

Despite the crackly signal and slight fuzzy static that marred his voice, hearing Tom on the phone made Sean smile foolishly and created an ache in his chest that could only be verbalised as the conversation slowed and calmed after the initial rush.

"I miss you." Tom echoed the sentiment with the same slightly wistful slant to his voice, fond and sad.

Tom spoke to Jon a little too and Sean heard Jon's easy laughter echoing through the apartment as he gave them a moment to catch up. 

"Man, course we're looking after each other." Hearing Jon assure Tom of that made Sean smile a little.

 

- 

 

Letters resumed and life continued. Something about Jon in Sean's life soothed the rough edges of coming home with only a picture to say goodnight to. He felt a little guilty sometimes that when he was with Jon he was able to forget just how much he missed Tom.

On Tom's birthday the pair of them got outrageously drunk in his honour. They drank to him, to his safety and to what he meant to them. Somewhere in the haze of the whiskey and the wine, Sean was able to register what it meant when Jon toasted Tom's smile with this particular kind of fondness in his voice, what it meant when Jon just smiled into his drink and looked sad when Sean rambled about the shade of Tom's eyes and how he laughed and his stupid adorable hair before he had to cut it off. Sean loved Tom, with all his heart, and he knew Jon did too, but until that night, sat in a busy bar toasting a man not there, Sean did not realise that Jon loved Tom in the exact same way he himself did.

 

-

 

The day Tom was able to sit on cam with then for an hour was simultaneously the most fucking horrid and wonderful thing. It was like, suddenly he was real again; sitting there, tanned and tired eyed but smiling, for them, hair painfully short for Sean's taste, clean shaven jaw making him look like the teenager he'd first met. He just talked to them, laughed like the expression was unusual on his set tired features. Making him laugh was a task at the best of times, but to see him do it then meant all the more. Jon was messing with the keyboard and screen capping him. Sean let him do it, it was kind of endearing. 

Tom's awkward little wave goodbye and his lopsided smile burned on the inside of Sean's eyelids for weeks. It made his heart ache.

 

- 

 

It had been eight months. Hurt though it did, Sean was used to being without him. Sean's life was him and Jon, work and music, lazy nights watching shit films or having a beer with friends. It was strange, but it had become normal, comfortable. He'd learnt to live again, just in a different state. He was the closest to being happy he thought he could be without Tom there, and he was through the worst of it. Just four more months. He clung to that like a lifeline. 

 

- 

 

Sean's life fast became a dragging count down of months and weeks. It was getting there. So close but it seemed to take so bloody long. When they finally got another cam call, it made Sean's heart ache and ache for what he was so close to having back.

They talked and they laughed some and they made plans, plans for things they were going to do when Tom got home. Him and Sean, and Jon too. It seemed impossible that it was so close now.  

Tom was childish on camera, grinning more than was his wont to do, infectiously caught up in the idea of home, he rubbed at his buzzed short hair and spoke of growing it again, he  smiled at them both so steady and warm and tired. Sean wanted him back in his arms so badly then, he damn near was ill with it. 

He thinks, though he doesn't say it, that Jon maybe wanted the same, though he wasn't going to get it the same way. These things found the two of the standing in the small space of Sean's kitchen, hugging tightly, closer than perhaps a hug should be. It didn't matter, it made them feel better. 

 

-

 

Picking up the phone to hear Tom's mum on the line was something Sean had grown used to. She liked to catch up, stay in the loop. She was a good woman and Sean was glad she always took time out to check on him.

He picked up the phone, distracted with trying to build a new table for the tv he'd bought. The guy in the store had told him it was easy to assemble, so he was trying, slowly, and mostly failing, but, it was a present for Tom, who'd always complained of their current one, coffee marked and wobbly as it was.

It took long slow minutes for him to really catch up with the words on the other end of the line, the movie running out of sync to the sound.

When it did, he knelt back and slowly leant against the bottom of the couch, holding the phone to his ear, table before him completely forgotten. His eyes weren't really focusing and his heart was hammering painfully against his rib cage. 

Tom was coming home early. Sean had wished to hear those words for months and months and now he hated them, because of what they implied, what they meant. He hated them.

He ended the call and dropped the phone down beside him. Shock giving way slowly to tears that made way for sobs, uncontrollable tremors racking his body.  Crumpling in on himself surrounded by instruction pamphlets, wooden pieces, screws and tools, he cried until the sobs were dry and painful and he could hardly breathe.

 

- 

 

Tom came home 11 months after he had left and Sean met him at the airport.

He reached out and hardly dared to touch, fingers sliding over the cool wooden surface of the box, fisting in the stupid fucking flag draped over it.

_... fingers sliding along a smooth jaw, fisting in the rough material of Tom's shirt..._

He choked back a small sound, lips in a set firm line, arms achingly empty, hand covering his mouth.

_...slow spreading warm smile and delighted laugh, clutching him close as he can, steady tight arms holding Sean right back, lips meeting in a very long awaited firm kiss..._

He waited so long for this day. The day he'd get Tom back.

_...mumbled soft words._

_"God I've missed you Tommy"..._

"God I've missed you Tommy." Sean's voice cracks.

_"Yeah, missed you too babe." Warm, quiet, tight strong arms and steady heartbeat. "S'good to be home."_

 


End file.
